New Capacities

New capacities extend the ability of communities to meet familiar poverty-related challenges like health, education, employment, and shelter. They also create a rich ecosystem of resources, relationships, and infrastructures for responding to new stresses and, more importantly, for creating wealth out of poverty. These new capacities tend to have three distinctive characteristics: First, they change the scale of solutions, leveraging both very small and very large innovations. Second, they tap new digital infrastructures to make scarce resources more affordable and even abundant. And third, they create new relationships across the public and private sectors. Together, these innovations are building smarter communities, a stronger workforce, and more resilient environments-both built and natural.

Action Zones

Throughout the developing world, communities are building out their ICT infrastructures. These infrastructures are the starting place for catalyzing smart communities—those that tap everything from smart cards and mobile phones to new sharing platforms that can connect the dots between cutting-edge services and people who have traditionally been excluded from them.

The Pivotal Challenge

Growing Economies of Violence

New capacities for economic improvement are, unfortunately, also building a shadow infrastructure for piracy, human and drug trafficking, and organized crime throughout the developing world-all fueled by growing inequality. These economies of violence will challenge both rich and poor over the coming decade.